Spring Cleaning

On the first really warm spring day every year, I like to open the windows, put on a couple Bob Marley records (yes, records) and start my spring cleaning. It still hasn’t gotten warm enough for that here in Iowa, but I was getting impatient so I decided to start things early.

I took time away from cleaning up my electronics area to solder together these new components – a PS/2 keyboard adapter and a pair of voltage level converters. We’ll be seeing more of them in upcoming projects.

Spring cleaning for me always devolves into a number of small side-projects. I started cleaning up and reorganizing my electrical components, and ended up soldering up a couple components that arrived recently from SparkFun and AdaFruit. I started looking for books to sell to make space on my shelves, and ended up rereading Bored of the Rings (regrettably, the 15 years since the last time I read it has not made it funnier). There’s some vacuuming and dusting mixed in there too, but really the whole spring cleaning project is about managing digressions, which are the fun part.

For this blog, spring cleaning means fresh backups, a few minor tweaks, and a scheduling change. With the weather improving, I’m anticipating an every-other-week posting schedule at least through the summer. There are two reasons for that. One is that I hope to spend some more time outside, and I really do need the exercise. The other is that, over the last few weeks, I’ve spent almost as much time writing about projects as working on them. Now I’m looking ahead to some meatier software projects: Some C64 graphics stuff, the next phase of Project:65, and dusting off some old OpenGL projects. I figure I’m going to benefit from a higher ratio of development time to writing time with that stuff.

So for the next few months I’m going to try to have something significant every two weeks, with maybe a minor update or anecdote or link in between, and we’ll see how that goes. I think it’ll make for a nice groove.